Arvon shortlisted entry- Johan’s Letter by Jon Freeman

Everything was waiting to change. She could feel it, just there, waiting. Is this really me? A taxi swerved to avoid her and blared it is horn.Pay attention lass, dont get killed now! She paused beneath the red rail sign and looked back. December mornings in Leeds are not full of joy. Long night-dark reluctant to surrender its old cold, grips hard, and she knew it was one of those when the best the day was going to manage was a grey gloom. Everything looked backwards, photo-negative; with black the underlying colour. All else, the earth-red of ever-present brick, the flash of car or billboard, just a flimsy tinsel coating; peeling away at the slightest scratch to reveal the grubby truth beneath. Sodium lamps scribbling the damp air to orange fuzz without ever lighting anything up.

Outside the station the steel skeleton of something new was going up. It looked stupid, like a flying saucer, but probably had won an award. Hard handed men with cigarette-hanging lips, scarred tan boots and dirty helmets eyed commuters from far away, the street shared but their different worlds barely touching. She hurried past the workmen quick as she could, but they scarcely noticed the slight girl-boy. Saving their wolfie-whistles for some fat slapper she thought, pulling her jacket tight around her.

That jacket was her favourite thing. Grey-olive drab with a million pockets and someone else’s flag on the arm. She had stencilled her name under the little    banner in black marker pen. Jayne, with a Y. It was camouflage, armour, and home all in one. Like a bloody snail, our Sis Kate had said. But what did she know with her tarty heels and skirt so short she was always flashing her knickers? The builders would have whistled at her, and she had a boyfriend. And bruises on her soft white arms. It had come from the surplus, that jacket, and it had been a whole month before she found all the pockets. She wondered about the person who’s name was printed on the official label inside. ‘Reitter, J.’ She wondered if he was dead. A man presumably; Johan, perhaps? Last night she had dreamed again that she found another hidden pocket inside her coat, his coat. In it had been a letter folded up. It was so small at first but it opened and opened up in a glorious unfolding and was full of his life. Personal private things made of bright joy and burning pain and brilliant sorrow. It was one of those dreams that seemed so real that when you woke up you believed it completely.  It faded into the dark as she lay there, and she cried without knowing why.

On the windy station concourse echoing to the sound of things passing, she pulled out the ticket. It trembled in her bony cold hand like a live thing just as it had a week ago when it first came to her. She had been sitting on the rotting green bench in the park with the wind driving litter and ducks across the kiddies playground and whipping her hair over her face and in her mouth. Then it came. Something suddenly caught flapping against her boot. She bent and grabbed it before it could escape, and the long strip of thin card twisted and shook showing first its patterned front with small print and then its back with the broad black magnetic strip. It was a ticket. She peered at the details; a train ticket, ‘Leeds to Penzance, Route: any permitted,’ whatever that meant. It was dated for one weeks time. It tugged, straining to be free, struggling to be away. She held it tight and put it into her safest inner pocket, the one with three buttons. She hugged her coat to her then with arms folded, and as many times in the week that followed she could feel the ticket pressing sharp against her heart. For days she told no one about it, which was always her way. But it burned at her, the secret of it, the ticket moving against her breast, and the wondering. After four days she told Hayley.

Hayley was her best friend, well, pretty much her only friend really, and worked in a dingy backstreet goth shop behind the Corn exchange. Hayley believed that piercings could save the world. So Jayne told her everything, about the ticket, about Johan Reitter and Route: any permitted. Hayley put down her cheap cafe cup with the dark red lipstick crescent and a dried scum of cappuccino.

“Oh Jayne pet, don’t be a daft silly cow. Where would you go? What would you do? How would you live? You can’t just run away; That's not you! Its not so bad here as all that, is it?” She looked at Hayley and thought of the people they had been at school with, those kind of half-friends you spend so much time with then feel bad because you scarcely miss them when they’re gone. It was a bit desperate; a lot of them were knocked up by now, some of the lads were banged up. A couple were dead. Anything to get out of it would do, but smack and crank were the drugs of choice on the tower-block estates. Get out of it, but go nowhere. You could see it in their dead eyes. She could see the desperation in Hayley’s eyes, and hear the echo of things she’d never said in her voice. She looked at her, like it was the first time. Pretty, clever, funny Hayley. She wished there was something she could say, just for once, that was clever or funny or beautiful. Something that would make Hayley see, make her understand. But there wasn’t. Jayne nodded and bit her lip,

“no, maybe it isn’t so bad”. She left the cafe and could feel the ticket’s hard edges inside her pocket. She didn’t tell anyone else, and she didn’t meet up with Hayley again.

Outside the station Croissant Shop she sat on the metal chair,chipped red enamel, so cold. She rubbed her hands and watched the information board showing trains arriving, leaving, delayed and cancelled. Her throat constricted and she clenched her fists, what if her train was cancelled? She thought of the dream again, and of Johan’s letter that somehow was his life, the places he’d visited, his journeys and joys, the stations and sorrows he’d passed through. What did the ticket mean? Why her? What was; 'Route: any permitted'?

The lines on the information board flickered upwards, and there at the bottom her train appeared; 08.35 Penzance, Platform 11, On Time. Perhaps the ticket wasn’t lying after all. She suddenly felt hungry and used the five pound note she had taken from Our Mam’s purse to buy a hot chocolate and a Croissant. They were the most delicious things she’d ever had. There wasn’t much change left over, but she knew that really didn’t matter now.

The refurbishment work was nearly complete and the platforms were larger and, for the moment, cleaner. For all the extra light though, it was a place of terrible greyness. She stamped her feet to keep warm and watched the people, wondering about their lives and where they were all so busy going. She stood at the platform edge, staring at the gleam of the rails and wondering why more people weren’t killed falling onto them. The thought made her dizzy. With a start, she realised the train was arriving and she stepped back. It looked somehow like a giant’s toy, all plastic modern, all silver and red. People crowded to the platform edge as though they feared being left behind. This was it then; her last chance to change her mind. She didn’t have to go. She could stay and Mam would love her whatever, and there was Our Kate and Hayley too. She thought of Johan Reitter and wondered where he was now. For a moment the deathly weight of her Leeds life and whole history was in her boots, and every force was pulling her back, back and down to the world she knew. Against all that gravity she climbed on board the train.

The train was full and everything else was empty as it pulled out from beneath the canopy of the station. It was like poison being drawn from a wound. She    remembered how when she was fourteen-and-three-quarters she had to go to the doctors to have a boil lanced. It was so painful it made her sick, and yet at the same time it was such a massive relief. The train started out slowly, too slowly, behind mills and warehouses, crossing canals and places where rubble and twisted metal was being chewed by machines. Fine drizzle coated the windows of the carriage and the empty wastelands between half-boarded houses and rusting fences were lonely with straw-dead grass and black tangled trees. She saw someone that for just a second looked like her, sat sad smoking cigarettes on a half-burned sofa under polythene stretched between branches and a pile of old tires. Scrapyards and broken-roofed workshops rolled past, endless, and the day seemed darker still.

Jayne kicked off her boots, drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. She could still feel the stiff rectangle of the ticket in her pocket. It felt like a folded letter. She leaned sideways resting her head against the seat back which smelled of other people’s skin. The train rolled southwards on and on and out, and its route was like the track-marks beneath the skin of the dirty sick, cold junkie of a city. She knew that somewhere, somewhere else, the sun was shining. She was leaving at last, by any route permitted.